Draíocht Blog

Monsters, elephants, frogs, owls, cats … We made some amazingly Beastly Bookmarks at Family Day on Saturday 9th April.

We used a mixture of magazines (for cutting out images), drawing, coloured paper, sticky on eyes, lots of imagination and then finally our trusty laminator to stick it all together!
We even made our own tassles with wool!

Super enjoyable and very easy to make!! Hopefully you'll be inspired to try your own!

Last Saturday we had the first Family Day of the year and it was BUSY, BUSY, BUSY!

Some lovely Draíocht workers had been collecting 2 litre plastic bottles since well before Christmas and we used every single one of the 80 odd bottles that had taken over in and around my desk.

Now those bottles have relocated to homes all over Dublin 15 and beyond as piggy banks and tigers banks… and cats and dogs, there was even an octopus......

........not to mention the giraffe and crocodile!

If you missed our family day, but have a 2lt bottle and a willingness to save, why not make your own animal bank. You’ll need a glue stick, some coloured paper, a scissors and some toilet roll tubes.

Give your bottle a bit of a rinse and let it dry. Cut a slot in the side of the plastic bottle- an older person with a blade can come in handy here, but a scissors can do the job. Glue paper around the middle of the bottle, covering the slot and about 2/3rds of the central area of the bottle. Feel the slot you had created earlier and cut away the paper that has covered it over. Now, start to cut out the other features for your animal, like ears, eyes, and nostrils from construction paper. When making ears, leave a little extra paper (or tabs) so you have something to stick to the bottle. You can attach all your features with double-sided tape or glue. Cut legs from the toilet roll tubes, making each one about 1.5inches, you can shape these to the contours of the bottle, collage or cover with paper and tape all four to the bottle. Make a hole in back to insert a pipe-cleaner or art straw tail. If its a pig, make the tail curly, with a bit of a twist. Now start to save your money! Simple!

If you would like further instructions on this, or any of our workshops, please free to contact me (sarah@draiocht.ie). Or you can come along and ask us in person at the next family day on 9th March 2013- we will be making some fancccy hats for St. Patricks Day.

Unlike most years, we had a pretty quiet Family Day on the 8th of December... it could be because it coincided with probably one of the busiest Christmas shopping days of the year! But those that joined us in our first floor gallery printed some very beautiful cards with the help of our artists Jenny, Deirdre, Gen and Andrew.

If you want to make some printed Christmas cards like these at home, you can make a version of what we did with the help of a bit of recycling! Just keep the polystyrene trays that fruit and vegetables sometimes come in and any wrapping, posters or sheet of paper that have a plastic feel to them that might come in your letter box.

Start by using a pen to draw into the Polystyrene, marking out whatever picture you would like to print. Then roll out some paint- we used printing ink and perspex, but acylic paint would do the job and you could spread it onto the plastic coated advertisment that came through your door. This is so the paint is nice and thin...

Best to get you hands on a roller, which you can get from most art supply shops- but a paintbrush will work too.

Next, roll the paint out on to the polystyrene picture (as shown above), thinly and evenly and then press it down onto some paper.

Give it a good rub, pull it off and hey presto, you have a print!

Another idea is to cut up the polystyrene (or thick cardboard would do), then arrange and glue your cut out shapes onto a square of carboard, in a design you like. Roll over your design with an inked up roller. The paint will attach only to the design, as it is raised away from the cardboard base. You have created a stamp. Place your inked stamp down onto a sheet of paper and once again, give it a good rub. When you take it off, only your design should remain.

You can print these stamps over and over again in as many coloures as you would like. Once the print has dried you can glue it on to some card and discover that you will never have to buy a Christmas card again!

We also improvised & made some Christmas decorations for our tree with the left over print templates…

Any Questions, feel free to give drop me a mail (sarah@draiocht.ie) or drop into our next FREE family Day on Sat 26th of January 2013- We will be making piggy banks.

The last Saturday’s Family Day did not have the turn out as big as usual, but we can’t complain, because everyone likes when the sun shines, we hope you were busy makingsand sculptures at the beach, making stick collage in the park or just reading in the rare March sunshine.

We still had plenty of talented people here… they just made art in a more quiet environment then usual!

If you missed it, maybe you’d like to make it at home: So, here is a quick run down of what we did. If you would like more indepth instructions please contact me (sarah@draiocht.ie). We used toilet rolls (thanks to all the lovely arts workers in the office for that!), bird seed (because it has different size seeds but rice, chick peas or whatever will do), (masking) tape, glue (sticks) and a trick, with that ever versatile wonder, that is tin foil.

I found the tin foil trick on this ridiculously inventive website instructables (warning: this website is addictive!). Lot of scraps of paper, feathers, markers or other odds and ends to decorate.

Tape about 4-5 toilet rolls together, to make one large stick:

Grab a length (about 1.5times the length of your stick) of tin foil and twist it to make it look like a length of rope, before coiling it around (you could used the leg of a chair if this is hard to do) to make it look like a spring. Make two tin foil coils like this.

Then coil these two tin foil “springs” around each other. Push the double coil into the toilet rolls and tape them to each end of the tube.

Now, seal up one end of the stick with paper, before pouring a couple of hand fulls of seeds into the tube.

Seal up that end. Give it a shake- does it need more? Less? Try different seeds, there is no wrong noise, so have an experiment until you like the sound of your RainStick.

To finish decorate the outside of your Rain Stick by gluing on strips of different coloured paper- old wrapping paper and magazines will work really well.

Now turn it slowly up and down, letting the contents fall from one end to the other- does it sound like rain? Enjoy your rain sticks- if clouds form and start to look like this….

......hide it and deny everything!

Next family day will be on Sat 19th May 2012 to celebrate National Drawing Day. We’ll create some magic by drawing some optical illusions.